A.D. Carson’s “Being Dope” Confronts History Through Hip Hop

With his new book, Being Dope: Hip Hop and Theory through Mixtape Memoir, A.D. Carson invites readers into a form of scholarship that resists easy categorization. UVA’s associate professor of hip hop and the Global South blends rap lyrics, poetry and reflective prose in an examination of how histories of enslavement, criminalization and cultural erasure continue to echo through contemporary Black life. The result is a work that challenges conventional academic boundaries while illuminating the power of hip hop as both a medium of creation and critique.

Through intimate narrative and incisive critique, Carson reveals how hip hop can illuminate hidden structures of power while offering new ways of knowing the world. Ultimately, Being Dope asks what becomes possible when artists define themselves on their own terms 

Read an excerpt from Being Dope:

Excerpt

The site of “the most exciting 25 seconds in college football” 
was made possible by profits from the most shameful centuries in America’s history, 
but come to the campus of Clemson University, 
and you’d hardly be able to tell it from looking around. 

Solid Orange, you’ll see.

I arrived in Clemson, South Carolina, from Illinois on July 10, 2013. My brother and I drove a moving truck overnight from Springfield. I didn’t know anything about the place. In Illinois I worked as a high school teacher, a program coordinator for an after-school program, and an artist-in-residence at one of the universities there. But I was happy to have been accepted in the doctoral program in Rhetorics, Communication & Information Design here in South Carolina. I didn’t know much about the campus or its history.

The grounds are perfectly manicured— alluring— 
and monuments to the greatness that creates such institutions 
stand as reminders from whence we came, 
and since we gain so much from what we see, 
we smile, 
proud of the great tradition of which we have the benefit of saying we are now a part. 

Solid Orange, we are.

The first time I visited Fort Hill, there were two older white women who asked if I was new in town. Actually, they asked if I was a freshman (their words), because it was a Friday, and I was wearing a black shirt. I love black. I told them, “no,” that I was a graduate student. And then they told me that everybody wears orange on Fridays. Later, I jokingly said to someone online, “I guess I represent the stripes.” At the moment, I just went about my tour of the plantation house.

And it’s easy to buy in— 
it starts with “The Song That Shakes the Southland” 
and a sea of solid orange— “Tiger Rags” that kind of grab you and say, 

“You are now a member of this family! 
You are now a Clemson Tiger. 
Wear your orange proudly.”

If you had toured Fort Hill during that time, then you would know that it was a surreal experience. Enslaved people euphemistically referred to as employees and workers, Calhoun lauded as a statesman with “steadfast principles,” Clemson, a place where “everything we do reflects on every other Tiger. It’s just a part of what makes Clemson uniquely Clemson” (from the “Solid Orange” website).

but 
it’s a pretty well-known fact that tigers have stripes, 
and almost as well known is the reason they do, 
yet, Clemson University— home of the Tigers— 
doesn’t do much acknowledging of
those dark marks it knows to be so integral a part 
of its existence. 

“Solid Orange,” we say.

My first Saturday in Clemson was the day George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin. I didn’t know very many people in town. 

at this university that was once a plantation, 
slavery being “a positive good” according to Master Calhoun, 
whose house sits, still, 
on a plot atop a hill 
overlooking the football field— 
open seven days a week, 
and I can even enter through the front door. 

Professor Rhondda Robinson Thomas delivered a talk on her essay, “‘Slaves of the State’: Convict Labor and Clemson University Land and Legacy,” that was going to appear in The South Carolina Review in the spring of 2014, and it gave me an idea related to the kind of work I’d already been doing—take the noise, the excuses for vigilantism, the desire for Black compliance, the unbearable silence about how what was going on in the world related to what I saw every day walking the campus, take that noise, and make it into music.

What I cannot do, however, is depend on the tour guide to give me the whole history 
of the foundations of my university, because— 
for some reason or another— 
it’s uncomfortable for some people to talk about 
slave owners, supremacists and segregationists on those terms, 

or 

it’s unknown to the individual responsible 
for the dissemination of that information 
about this place. 

but 

twenty score 
and many more years ago 
our forefathers brought forth on this continent 
our forefathers and our foremothers 
and exploited them for hundreds of years, 
which led to our being 
conceived in captivity 
and “dedicated to the proposition” 
that history is a matter 
of telling the story that makes us look best. 

“Solid Orange,” I think.

And that’s how “See the Stripes” started.

My program advisor, Victor J. Vitanza, gave me the opportunity that first summer to travel to Saas- Fee, Switzerland, to attend the European Graduate School. I stayed about an hour from the village that James Baldwin describes in his essay, “Stranger in the Village.” I finished the first draft of the “See the Stripes” text in between reading my Baldwin anthology and attending the lectures there.

And that forces me to confront my active participation in 
not only the crime, but the cover-up—
the whitewashing, with orange, of the dark parts of a 
history meant to be instructional, lest we repeat it…